let the only sound be the overflow
by margaritta
Summary: Her other patients aren't anything like this one. -— Hermione/Tom, AU.


**a.n.:** This was inspired by the story of The Joker and Harley Quinn, and I've slipped some of Snape's story into Tom's for the sake of the plot - but this _is_ wildly AU, so. Set in "modern" day, non-magic.

* * *

**let the only sound be the overflow**

**.**

**.**

_but as the water fills my mouth_  
_it couldn't wash the echoes out_  
_I swallow the sound and it swallows me whole_  
_till there's nothing left inside my soul_  
_I'm empty as that beating drum_  
_but the sound has just begun_

–– FLORENCE &amp; THE MACHINE

* * *

_(after)_

Most people don't really understand how it feels when you realize that you've betrayed yourself.

Hermione Granger knows, and she's pretty sure she knows better than anyone else, but the ceiling is too close and too white for her to focus and think properly, and her head is pounding with a fervor. She has this feeling that someone had to whack her, in the end, or maybe the sedative they gave her is just too strong.

She shuts her eyes as tightly as she can and tries to let the darkness take her.

In her head, the little white room is on fire, and she's lugging something heavy toward the door. People are screaming, yelling at her, and something is gnawing at her ankle, and the linoleum is bright red lava beneath her feet.

She's lugging a body.

Despair is making the tips of her fingers hurt and tingle, but that's real life and it probably has something to do with the IV in her arm, or the sound of the fluorescent white lights buzzing all around her. Her head really _hurts._

_You've been so stupid_, she thinks.

So she forces herself to open her eyes.

_(before)_

"And the case file?" Hermione asks, lightly tapping her pen against the palm of her hand. Minerva McGonagall is standing straight-backed beside her, and they're looking through the one-way-mirror.

The room beyond is nothing if not immaculately clean, bright and white and empty enough to make something coil and clench in her chest. Its single occupant is sitting perfectly still at the table, staring at his hands. His mouth is moving, just barely – if she hadn't been looking so intently, she might have missed it – and it's as though he is muttering to himself under his breath. That's not uncommon, here, and it doesn't quite alarm her.

Hermione has a large, quite pretty degree leaning up against the wall in her low-rent apartment, with her name in black scrawling script in the middle and the word _psychoanalysis_ bleeding through the paper. It's been there since she moved in the apartment; not hung up or framed, just sitting like a forgotten painting, because ever since she got the internship, she hasn't spent all that much time at home.

She knew this before she even started university; internships at the Hogwarts Institute for the Clinically Insane are the most sought after in the entire country, as long as you're concerned with learning and not with earning (or doing any good at all). She knew this before she even started working here; it's a building full of lost causes, as many of them among the staff as among the patients. It's not a happy place, or an easy place, but as far as practice goes, there isn't anywhere better.

Hermione applied because she'd heard about the resident physician. Doctor Minerva McGonagall has been running the Institute for a decade now, with a steady hand and smart indifference to the complications of the job. She's hard like stone, Hermione's heard, and in the past week, that's been proven entirely true.

Part of Hermione wishes she knew how to be cold like that.

Her other patients aren't anything like this one, whose lucidity alone is disturbing. Despite the murmuring, his eyes, even from a distance, are startlingly clear.

When Minerva doesn't say anything, Hermione repeats herself. "His case file, Miss McGonagall?"

Minerva shakes her head slightly, peering at her through her curved eyelashes without deigning to turn her head. "That won't be necessary."

Hermione thinks of the large stack of case files for all the other patients sitting on her desk. "Isn't it always necessary?" she asks, slowly, raising her eyebrows.

Minerva goes back to looking at the patient, who is now tapping his fingers against the table in some bizarre rhythm that she doesn't seem to bother to follow. "Not in a situation like this."

"A situation like what?" Hermione is starting to get a strange feeling in the pit of her stomach.

Minerva picks up her own notebook and tucks it under her arm. "That's your job to tell me, isn't it? Once a week, doctor," she says, and then she's gone.

The door to the viewing room swings shut, and Hermione is left staring through the one-way-mirror at the patient. _Tom Riddle,_ Minerva had told her.

As she watches, Tom stops tapping his fingers and looks up at his own reflection in the mirror. Hermione blinks, and for a moment she feels like the ability to breathe has deserted her; and then, slowly, surely, he raises his right hand and waves.

Her heart stops in her chest.

**I.**

"Name?"

"It doesn't say that in your file?" he says, a cold, smooth thing, and nods at the empty manila folder in her hand. She folds it into the pages of her notebook and tries to pretend that she knows him.

"Just answer the question." Her voice is flat, perfect for the antiseptic room, with its white walls and cool blue bedsheets. The mirror at her back makes her nervous, and she remembers, vividly, how he acted as though he could see through it.

"Tom Riddle," he says.

"Age?"

"Older than I look."

She grits her teeth and tries not to care that he is now smiling, as provocative as a smile can be. _Belligerent,_ Minerva had told her about him. That's not even the half of it, she thinks now.

"Occupation?" she asks, and lowers her eyes to her papers, pretends that she's writing his answers down. These questions are mere preliminaries; she might not have the case file, but she knows all of the answers.

"Sociopath, homicidal," he says with the air of someone both terribly bored and terribly amused.

"I meant prior to incarceration," she clarifies, and she sounds slightly stupid to her own ears.

He smiles. "I know what you meant."

Hermione draws a pretty little swirl across the lined paper, winding along one of the lines so that it looks as though she might be writing. His eyes are heavy where they glide across her skin. The cell is filled with white light and incongruously freezing.

"I'm not asking for a diagnosis. I'm asking you for your job."

Tom leans back in his chair, just far enough to make it clear that he still expects the front legs to tip up off the ground. Hermione almost smiles when his shifting weight is met with solid resistance. All the chair's legs are nailed into the ground. A flicker of annoyance twists his features before he blanks his face once again, and quickly sculpts it back into challenging amusement.

"Did they tell you what I did?" he asks, sounding genuinely curious, but Hermione has a feeling she ought to know better than to believe the tone of his voice to be even remotely close to genuine.

"Your job, Tom," she persists. Doctors are never supposed to answer patients' questions.

He regards her calmly, eyes sweeping over her hands carefully holding her notebook on her lap. Strands of thick gold-brown hair tumbles from the knot she's hastily fastened at the nape of her neck. It flutters in front of her face, blurring all the monotonous details of the room, and distorting the way that his eyes dart to follow it.

She tucks it back up, absentmindedly resting one hand on the table, beside her pen. He reaches for it, before she can understand what he is doing, and there is a moment of blind panic when she remembers what Minerva had said about letting any of the patients near a pen.

_They'll maim themselves, easy. And some of them will go for you._

None of the patients are allowed anything, not pens or books or any kind of paper, just their empty cells and their nailed down furniture, and bed sheets only for the ones who haven't been diagnosed with any sort of depression.

But his hand moves past the pen, brushing lightly against her wrist. "You should ask them to tell you what I did," he says.

She snatches her hand away, taking the pen with it. "You're not supposed to touch me," she says, surprised at her own breathlessness, and a moment later she reprimands herself for how terribly _childish_ she sounded.

He tilts his head to the side, offering her the slightest consideration. "My mistake," he says finally, and withdraws back into his seat.

**.**

"I want his file." She's standing in the doorway of Minerva's office, knuckles turning white against the doorjamb.

Minerva raises a brow and looks her up and down. Critically. Hermione has just come from the bathroom, fighting off a furious sweat and inexplicable desire to vomit. Her hair is a bushing mess, and her shirtsleeves wrinkled where she had them bunched up to the elbow. She doesn't care, though, and she can't calm down until she _knows_.

"The file, please, Miss McGonagall," she repeats, this time her voice the slightest bit firmer.

Minerva looks back down at the paperwork on her desk. Her pen goes back to scratching. "No," she says, when the silence has dwelt so long that Hermione is about to ask again.

Hermione feels fear and anxiety rise in equal measures. "Why are you determined not to show me—"

"I'm not determined," Minerva says briskly, slamming her pen down on the desk. "I'm decided. And if you cannot evaluate him as he is, without the aid of a previous diagnosis, then I'm not sure if an internship here is right for you."

Hermione doesn't know what to say.

"There is a difference," Minerva continues, softening a bit, "between what they teach you in school and the actual feeling in your gut when you sit down across from evil incarnate. But knowing all the extraneous information is not going to ease your fear."

"But I have all of the files for my other patients."

Minerva sighs and picks up her pen. Hermione watches her rectangular glasses tip down, almost off the edge of her nose as she bends back over her paperwork. "You have my final answer, doctor."

**II.**

"Why do they let you in with me?" he asks, watching with mild curiosity as she writes down the date at the top of the page in her notebook.

"Excuse me?"

"You take the others to a separate room. I've seen you." He's trying to look at leisure in his chair but the back is too rigid and the room is too white, and he just looks _wrong_ in all the insipid blankness with his black hair and burning eyes. Hermione wonders what it's like to live in here. "Why don't you have to do that with me?"

She can't tell if he feels special or left out, privileged or excluded, and she doesn't know the answer to the question, besides, so she just stares at him.

"Doctor McGonagall doesn't seem to think that you are dangerous," she says finally, and that makes a smile spread across his face, so wide and honest (and dangerous, this _looks_ dangerous) that it takes her breath away.

"What?" she asks blankly when she finds her voice.

He chuckles and shakes his head, the cutting curve of a smile burning up beneath the fluorescents. "She has to be the most idiotic person in this building, then."

**.**

Three days later, on the damp gray morning of a Thursday, she's walking her way down the corridor, abreast with a bulky security guard and a patient from the third floor. They're on their way to one of the evaluation rooms. The walls of the room they're heading to are as plain and white as everything else, but the room itself is smaller, more desolate. A table and two chairs, all nailed down, and a convenient little nook for the security guard to sit in.

Hermione cannot help but picture her meetings with Tom, the one-way-mirror rising like a mountain at her back, the sheet of glass separating them from the world. She is suddenly uncomfortably aware of how alone they are during those sessions, and wonders how Tom could pick up on it right away, and how she could not.

They pass by Tom's cell, and he's standing so close to the glass that Hermione has to concentrate on not seeming surprised. If he leaned forward at all, his nose would brush against the panel separating them, so she looks straight ahead and pretends not to notice the way that he raises his eyebrows at her patient and mouths _see?_

She wonders exactly how much questioning would get her lifted off the assignment, and then, quite deliberately, she doesn't say another word about it to Minerva ever again.

**III.**

"On the floor," she says firmly, and Tom starts as though she's just shot a gun at him.

"Pardon?"

Hermione throws her notebook onto the table, pen lodged safely in her pocket. She drops to the floor, knees coming against cool linoleum through the fabric of her trousers. Tom stares at her in disbelief. "We're trying something new today," she says, and pats the ground beside her.

"I'm trying to read," he says finally, matter-of-factly, though there is no book in sight.

"You're not allowed books," Hermione says as though talking to a child, and pats the floor more insistently.

Tom smirks at her as though _she_ is the child and taps his temple with his forefinger. "It's all up here," he says.

It takes her ten whole minutes to get him on the floor, and he folds out of his bed like a robot, stiff and mistrusting. Hermione cannot help a tiny smile as he lies down on his back, body parallel to hers. The cold floor is burning holes in her skin, and their arms are almost touching through the thin fabric of her cardigan.

She looks at the ceiling and listens to him breathe. This alone is somehow therapeutic, but she is not the patient, and she cannot speak for him.

"Why do you read?" she asks, and silently wills him to pretend that they're looking at the stars. The fluorescents are making her eyes water, but she wonders if this might make him open up.

"Why do _you_ read?" he says instead, and the words float up toward the ceiling-sky, too quickly, as though his mouth cannot quite hold onto them.

"To escape from reality," she says quietly, and purposefully forgets not to let the patient ask questions.

"Well," he says softly, and she can hear exactly how his smile has disappeared. "I think that you've answered your own question."

Hermione swallows hard, and tries to pretend that her eyes are not suddenly burning with what feels suspiciously like tears.

**.**

That night, she pulls books off of her bookshelves, picking titles that she imagines he would like and piling them up in neat stacks by the door of her apartment. Her picks are guesses, but there's that feeling that they're books he _would_ read if he could (or probably has read already) and the piles can't seem to stop growing. Eventually she has to stop, because she's exhausted and her head hurts and there are only so many decisions she can make in one day.

When she wakes up in the morning, she's sprawled out on and half falling off the couch, swaddled in yesterday's wrinkled work clothes. She's holding a still open book in one hand, her psychoanalysis textbook from her first year of college. She opens up her stiff fingers, slowly, letting go; and watches it fall to the floor, pages fluttering momentarily like a butterfly's brittle wings before impact.

She then checks her watch, and realizes she's already late for work.

On her way out the door, she keeps her nose in the air and pretends not to see her piles of books lining the carpeted floor.

**IV.**

"Don't," she says sharply, maybe a little too sharply, as he starts to lower himself to the floor. "Not today."

Hermione is sitting at the table in his cell, her back to the one-way-mirror as usual. Tom quietly takes the chair opposite her, seemingly unperturbed by this change of plan.

"Is it because _she's_ on the other side of the glass?" Tom asks, leaning slightly forwards and keeping his voice barely above a whisper. Hermione turns to look at the mirror, and sees only a reflection of distorted features – like puzzles with the pieces put together the wrong way at the corners – hers and Tom's, looking back at her.

She turns back to him, brow furrowed. "How did you know that?"

All he does is shrug.

Hermione sighs and opens her notebook, uncomfortably aware of Minerva's eyes on the back of her head. Maybe that's how Tom can see through the mirror, just from the pressing, painful weight of other people's eyes roaming over him. She takes a deep breath.

"Tell me about the house you lived in as a child," she says finally, all her focus on making herself sound detached and professional.

_I bet you grew up in a nice house, didn't you, doctor?_ she can already hear the icy retort forming on his lips. But he pauses, and his narrowed eyes flick toward the mirror behind her. When he looks back at her, he looks resolute.

Maybe even a little entertained by it all, but this is something she doesn't like to dwell on.

"A Victorian," he says, with the utmost normality. "A painted lady; my parents loved calling it that. But it was blue and violet, and I was teased relentlessly by my friends for it. It truly was hideous. The yard wasn't terribly large, but there was an old oak tree, taller than the house, and there was a family of sparrows that lived there one year…"

His response is so fluid and his tone sounds so sincere and maybe even nostalgic that she forgets to start writing, so surprised is she that he has answered the question at all. Never once before has he shown the slightest inclination.

"Kids would come over just to climb it, but I never could." His smile is a wan curve of the lips, a thing caught between bitter and wistful. "Upper body strength was never an asset of mine."

"How about friends?" Hermione breathes, barely daring to hope. The hand holding her pen is shaking so terribly that her handwriting is practically illegible.

"A girl named Lily, and her little sister Petunia. The three of us always got along, though Petunia was always a bit jealous of Lily. It was—" He coughs into his elbow, and then gives another little melancholic shrug. "It was a sister thing that I never really understood."

"Can't everyone understand jealousy?" Hermione asks.

Tom's eyes narrow and flick over her shoulder for the barest of seconds. "Personal experience, doctor?" He stabs her in the back with that, and Hermione's stomach clenches.

"_I'_m asking the questions," she says firmly, but cannot keep the quiver from her voice and the feeling of Minerva's eyes on her back has suddenly returned.

"Minerva's gone now," Tom says, and all traces of nostalgic sincerity are gone from his voice, from his eyes; he rises from his chair to go sit on his bed and barely spares her a glance. "And I wouldn't push my luck, if I were you."

The only sound after that is made by the box springs, crushing down beneath his weight.

Hermione finds Minerva in her office, typing frantically. She doesn't look up when the younger woman comes in, but her brow furrows slightly.

"You're doing a good job," she says in the end, voice flat.

"Yeah. Thanks."

"I have never seen him so compliant. It's an important improvement."

"Yeah," Hermione repeats, biting down sarcasm. "We've got a connection."

Minerva looks up at this. "I don't think I need to tell you to be careful, but—"

Hermione sighs. "I thought you knew what I mean." _I don't even know what I mean._

Minerva frowns and turns back to her computer. "I want you to keep working with him," she says, but the words sound as though they are difficult for her to force out, and after that, she just waits for Hermione to leave.

**.**

Later that afternoon, Hermione walks by Tom's cell. He seems to have recovered from his bout of brief surliness, and as she passes, he waves cheerily. His grin stops her in her tracks, and she stands in the middle of the hallway, staring stupidly at him.

As she watches, he stops grinning and mouths, _how did I do?_

Hermione doesn't know what to say.

**V.**

"And as a child?" She chews the end of her pen and avoids eye contact.

His legs are crossed, and he leans back, fingers steepled and just barely brushing against his lips. "As a child did I what?"

"Play sports," Hermione suggests tentatively. "Draw. Swim. Have a pet."

"Ah," he says smoothly. Then, a smile. "I liked to kill small things."

Hermione can see the smug look on his face clearly through the cover of his fingers, and despite the sudden chill creeping down her spine she can feel a headache coming on. "No, you did not," she says tiredly, and scratches her pen against the paper. All of her notebook pages look an awful lot like this, dated at the top and overflowing with empty scrawling swirls. She'll fill a whole book the day he decides to give her the slightest bit of honest information.

His eyebrows raise. "Don't you know that killing adorable little helpless things is the first sign of homicidal tendencies? Indifference to suffering is such a shame in a little boy—"

"I'm not asking you for a textbook definition of what you've been diagnosed with. I'm asking about _you, _Tom."

"Ah." He tilts his head slightly to the side. It looks quite polite, really; she might have been fooled had she first met him outside this building. "What about me?"

"Dammit," Hermione hisses. "Why can't you answer me? Last week—"

His eyes flicker to the mirror behind her, and the corner of his mouth tilts upwards. "That was just a show. For whoever was watching. And you know it."

"So you meant nothing." For some reason she forces herself not to understand yet, the realization _hurts_. It makes her heart ache and her stomach clench and her throat burn and _stop_ _stop_ _stop_\- "All of it, it was lies?"

He blinks, levels his gaze with hers, and gives a small nod as if to say, _of course, you stupid little girl._ Stupid, stupid, _stupid_-

"Why?" she breathes desperately.

His almost imperceptible smirk blooms into a full smile, and he slowly peels his fingers apart. "You wanted to keep working with me," he says casually.

She leans forward, across the little table, over her empty notebook and bitten pen. "_Bullshit,"_ she says clearly, heartache turning into anger.

"Excuse me?" Tom asks, and now he looks taken aback, smile frozen. _Here_, Hermione thinks. _Finally_.

"I don't think you've done anything for another human being in your entire life."

**.**

She's walking by, patient folder in hand, headed for a room on the opposite end of the hall. She's late, not that any of her patients would know the difference; none of them even have a clock. Her footfalls echo in an urgent rhythm, pit pat pit pat, sensible heel clicking against the linoleum floors, and she feels guilty nonetheless, as she turns the corner at the top of the stairwell and dashes past Tom's room as fast as she physically can.

Hermione is already two rooms down before she registers what she's seen. Several guilty, slow steps backward have her standing outside Tom's room, staring at him through the glass. He's sitting on his bed, head and back leaning up against the wall. His hands are clasped in his lap.

He smiles when he sees her, and raises a hand in greeting. She gapes, then turns and walks away.

She's almost certain that when she walked by the first time, Tom had been folding a paper crane.

**VI.**

They're sitting on the floor.

"Favorite animal?" she asks, playing tic tac toe with herself in her stiff white notebook as she pretends to write down his meaningless answers.

"Snake. Yours?"

_Doctors are not supposed to answer their patients' questions, doctors are not supposed to answer their patients' questions, doctors are not supposed to answer their patients' questions, doctors are not supposed to-_

"Lion. Why snake?"

"Why lion?"

She shakes her head. "Favorite color?"

"Green. Silver and green. Yours?"

"Red. And brown, I think. Have you ever been in love?"

He smiles, almost fondly. "What are you getting out of these questions, _doctor?"_ he asks patronizingly.

Hermione sighs and Xs beat Os for the fifth time that morning. She silently demands a rematch and draws the little board into an empty corner of paper. "You won't answer any of my others," she says simply.

"Ah," he says simply, and his features distort into a derisive little scowl before he speaks his next words – but he quickly schools his expression back to polite amity. "Yes. I've been in love. You?"

Hermione smiles and draws an O. "Tell me about her."

He withdraws as though she has slapped him across the face, but there is a smirk pulling at the corners of his lips.

"Oh, doctor," he chuckles. "That's not how this game works."

She's leaving, several minutes after he's erected a wall between them that she cannot seem to climb or demolish. The door is just a few feet away when she steps on something, which crumbles delicately beneath the sole of her shoe.

She bends for it, and picks it up between her finger and thumb. It's a tiny little piece of folded paper – a paper crane. Hermione turns to look at Tom, who is sitting on his bed, head leaned back against the wall, eyes closed.

She opens her palm, and watches the impossible object flutter to the ground.

**.**

Hermione sleeps on the floor of her office for the first time that night, curled up in a little ball beneath the protective shelter of her desk. Minerva is working late, and the light from her office is spilling out into the hallway and under Hermione's door.

She cannot sleep, as desperately as she wants to, and every night for the past week, she has woken screaming in her bed. A tall man with dark hair and dark eyes, who likes snakes and silver and green and has told her that he liked to kill little things, haunts her empty apartment in the dark.

Upstairs, some of the patients start moaning and tossing and turning, so Hermione just closes her eyes and waits until morning.

At some point, she must have fallen asleep, because she wakes up in the morning with a stiff neck and sleep crusting in her eyes. She reaches up to brush her hair out of her face, and there is something tangled in her hair. She pries it out gently, holds it up before her eyes until she can focus them.

Her heart stops, and she chokes so hard that she starts coughing and cannot stop.

In her hand is a paper crane, small and white and crumpled.

**VII.**

They're lying on the floor, arms barely touching, staring up at the ceiling-sky and not really thinking about anything. The moaning and screeching of the patients doesn't even bother her anymore, at least now when she's in his cell. He never makes noise – he just breathes. And she just listens.

"You've been out of this room," she says quietly, before she even realizes what she's doing. For a moment she imagines him rolling over her and strangling her to death. Her heart throbs. But he doesn't move.

And he doesn't say a word.

"You need to stop," she continues, and there isn't really anything else to say, unless she wants to mention how increasingly difficult it is becoming to hide the fact that she hasn't gotten the slightest bit closer to understanding his brain.

_A therapist's job is to help a patient understand himself. To be whatever that patient needs him or her to be._

_I'm not a therapist,_ Hermione thinks, starting to think that psychoanalysis is just a bunch of fancy script on her degree.

"Why haven't you told anybody?" he asks suddenly, and the question has her blinking twice as fast.

"I don't know," she says simply.

There's a moment of silence, before Tom rolls onto his side. His lips are inches from her hair, and his chest is pressed up against her arm. His warmth is painful in contrast to the cool linoleum floor pushing into her skin.

"The way I see it, doctor," he whispers, "either you're protecting me, or you don't even trust yourself to know the truth."

**.**

She doesn't go to lunch, even though Minerva comes in to ask her. Neville knocks a few minutes later and offers to bring something back for her. She smiles and declines.

When they're all gone, she closes her office door and picks up the phone. It takes two dials before anybody picks up, and Hermione can practically picture her father fumbling for the phone.

"Hermione?" he says uncertainly, and static rips through the receiver.

"Hi," she says. She wants to apologize for not calling more, but she cannot find the words. There's a lump in her throat where her voice belongs.

"Hermione," her father repeats, and this time the word is not a question. "It sure is good to hear from you," he says, honestly, and she bursts into tears.

"Daddy—" she chokes, and he just holds the phone and listens while she sobs.

**VIII.**

_She's behind the mirror,_ Tom tells Hermione with his eyes, because if he says it out loud, Minerva will listen. Hermione's glad he knows, because she hasn't the slightest idea, until she walks into his cell and sees him sitting there, hands folded delicately over each other on the table.

He looks up at her.

"Good morning," she says, and it's already early afternoon.

He glances toward the mirror. "Morning," he replies, and then somehow she knows. But this is good— better than good —and she takes her seat with her back to the mirror.

"Tell me about the woman you mentioned a couple of weeks ago," she says bluntly, and his face contorts. He is all at once furious and betrayed, overcome and outwitted. His eyes flick across her face, and briefly to the mirror before they narrow, and he grits his teeth and hisses like a snake.

Hermione's smirk is hidden, her back to the mirror, as Tom opens his mouth and starts to speak.

"I mentioned my friend Lily. We were neighbors when we were little, and she would come and climb the tree in my back yard. She was better than the other girls at it, though she'd only ever do it when me and her sister were around, because her mother dressed her in these horrible dresses and she didn't like the other kids to see her climb in them. It was bizarre to say the least." He swallows and shakes his head. "She was always bizarre.

"But she lived next door to me until we were both nineteen, and Petunia was younger. I don't really remember how much younger, but not that much. She always tagged along. She always _was_ a tag-along. I don't think it really bothered Lily, much, she liked being the leader when it came to her relationship with her sister – except when we got up to something dangerous or stupid, which was more than half of the time, and she felt like Petunia might get hurt.

"She'd send her home, and Petunia would cry, and it just kind of happened like that. I don't know. I never thought about it much. But when we were both nineteen, well, I was nineteen, and she a bit younger, by a bit, for our year, and we were both going off to college, and I felt that I would be missing something.

"We'd fool around, as kids, even though everyone teased me for hanging around with her. We practiced kissing, and that sort of stuff, until she got her first boyfriend. We had our rough patches, but had always been such a big part of my life, and I guess I was upset to be leaving her."

Tom coughs loudly and looks at his shoes.

Hermione lets the silence linger on, waiting for what comes next, until Tom glances up and looks her in the eye. His own eyes are furious and cloudy, and she very nearly recoils.

"Go on," she says quietly, and suddenly feels nasty for forcing him.

"_She's_ gone," Tom says. He's not smirking.

Hermione turns to glance at the mirror. "How do you know?"

Tom stands with force that would knock a normal chair backward, but as his is nailed down, he on succeeds in knocking himself over. When he stands back up, his eyes are burning like dark red coals, and Hermione feels a sudden sweep of shame.

"Tom," she says gently, and reaches for him.

"I've answered enough of your questions," he says coldly, and rage stirs alongside the pity inside of her.

"You don't get to decide that," she snaps.

"And you do?"

"I am your doctor, and I—"

"_ENOUGH,"_ he roars. "Enough." And he grabs her wrist as she reaches for him with such force that she thinks the bone might snap.

He looks at the places they are touching, and she's trying to tell him to stop but she can't get the words out. He lets go of her, throwing her wrist away from him in disgust, and he casts her from his little cell as if it were a castle and she a lowly servant.

**.**

She's in Minerva's office, lurking in the dark. Everyone has been gone for hours, back when Hermione had her light on and was pretending to be working. She had just been typing the words _Tom Riddle_ into a word document again and again.

But it's late now, and it's just her and the two security guards on the upper floors, and the ever droning moans of the patients up above. Hermione's got her hands buried to the wrists in Minerva's filing cabinet, searching through the Ts and the Rs, just in case everything was filed strangely, and she still can't find his file anywhere.

She wonders what is going on, if she's a part of something illegal, or if there is truly something in Tom's past that is too horrible for her to know. But no – not if Minerva wants her to keep working with him. But Hermione isn't making progress. Eight weeks into their time together and she knows nothing about him, other than that he likes snakes and green and silver and is a thousand times better at pulling information out of her than she is out of him.

She knows that she likes him, and that despite his peculiar ways and sometimes cold demeanor she can't imagine his doing anything that could land him in here. He's not like the others.

She's putting everything back where she found it when the moaning starts, loud and clear and groaning like the hinges of an old door. It overtakes the building, fills every nook and room, drones and drones until it's almost enough to drown in.

It's disgusting, but it is normal, and Hermione shuts the cabinets and checks to make sure she hasn't left anything on the floor.

Then there's a voice like a gun, cutting through all the others, screaming, "_SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP."_

It's Tom. _SHUT UP._

And Hermione doesn't think she has been more terrified in her entire life.

**IX.**

He won't move, and he won't speak, and he won't look her in the eyes no matter how many times she walks around to try and make him. She can't touch him, or maybe she just won't, because of how her heart was hammering when he grabbed her wrist a week ago.

Either way, it's never been clearer that he doesn't want to talk.

"Tom," she tries lamely, feeling more like a child than a doctor, which should probably be more of a problem than it is, since he is so very many years her senior, and she hasn't shown him even the slightest bit of capability. "I'm sorry."

He shakes his head. "You are not sorry, little girl. You're my _doctor_." And Hermione's not sure what she thinks of that. But she _is_ sorry, and she doesn't think that there is any way to make him believe it.

"I'll give you a week to cool off," she says finally, as coldly as she can, and as she's leaving, she swears she sees him lift his head to ask her not to go. But her footsteps are cruel and unforgiving against the linoleum in the hallway, and the sound of the door to his cell shutting is the most final thing she's ever heard.

As soon as she realizes what she has to do, she knows that it's a bad idea. The thing about it is that she's already crossed so many lines and reaped so few rewards that she doesn't have the heart to care anymore. It's a matter of getting through to him, and over the past two months, that's turned into the only thing she even cares about.

**.**

Hermione hears them talk about her, and it's all good talk, which is possibly more upsetting than if they had discovered the truth. Half of her is crying out for help, to be pulled back from the precipice before she falls and crumbles, and the other half is screaming at her to jump, _just jump already_.

She wonders how long she has left before she stops feeling horror at what is happening to her and just lets go, and then feels terrified that she even thought about it.

The other interns act as though she makes them look bad, and she probably does, because she's always typing at her computer when they leave for the evening, and still going at the same when they return in the morning. The residents are impressed. Maybe Minerva suspects something, or maybe she doesn't. It doesn't really matter any more, Hermione thinks.

Hermione, for her part, is simply fascinated by how beautiful the word _Riddle Riddle Riddle_ looks when typed over and over again a thousand times on her computer screen. She's burnt it into her retinas, and that's why, when she realizes what she has to do, there isn't even a tiny part of her that screams out in protest.

**X.**

"Ask me a question," she says, as soon as the door clangs shut, and when he looks up, slowly, her first irrational thought is that she's interrupted his reading.

But he doesn't have a book and 'it's all up here' and she is pretty certain that she's losing it and she firmly orders herself to pull herself together.

"Pardon?" he says tiredly, but there is interest in his eyes, and with a silent cheer she throws caution to the wind.

"Ask me a question," she repeats. Firmer now, more confident. "Anything. Anything you want."

And his mouth stretches into a smile such as she has never seen, which brings out the few creases around his eyes, which, for once, is not cruel and filled with condescension, but perhaps simply glad.

"Alright," he says slowly, and just when she thinks that he is going to lower himself beside her on the floor, he pats the rough and rumpled sheets that lay beside him on the bed.

**.**

There's a paper crane beside her head when she wakes up in the morning, and two messages on the answering machine from her landlord. She deletes them both, and presses the tiny bird as hard as she can against her palm, hoping that it will leave a mark.

By eight o'clock, when Neville walks by with his coffee and his briefcase, Hermione hasn't even caused the slightest discoloration in the skin.

**XI.**

She's got her legs lying across his lap, her back and head up against the wall. He's sitting perpendicular to her on the bed, resting up against his own wall, tapping in an oddly entrancing rhythm against her leg through her trousers.

If anyone walks by right now— _You're not supposed to touch me._

Hermione slides down to the floor, and Tom has the nerve to look hurt. She closes her eyes.

"Go on," he says encouragingly, after a moment, and she remembers saying those exact same words to him and receiving nothing in response.

"He broke his leg for the second time when we were eighteen," she says slowly. "It was my fault that time, too. It was our Senior Prom, and I ended up taking Viktor Krum, which doesn't mean anything to you, but he might have been cute if his nose weren't so large and his vocabulary not limited to fourteen words. I didn't like him very much, but he was the only boy I knew who didn't have a date three days before the event and showed any actual interest in me _and_ was an athlete.

"I blamed Ron for my impending date with Football Star Krum, because we were going to go together, and laugh it up and get a bit drunk and bid high school its overdue farewell. We were best friends going in, about to be best friends coming out. But he found a date, and didn't tell me until the last minute, and— well, you get it."

Tom arches an eyebrow and gives her a look that says, _does it look like I get it?_, but he nods anyway, and Hermione thinks that maybe he does get it. Or he will. Because she knows that they have jealousy in common.

"So Viktor gets me this hideous corsage, but I can't really blame him because it was so last minute, but it was ugly and I had to wear it, and I had to plaster on this smile because everyone was taking pictures.

"Anyway, at some point I ended up going to get myself some punch, and I was having a lot of trouble with the ladle, and trying to do it as slowly as possible to avoid going back to Viktor, when Ron came up to me.

"He said 'hey,' in this awkward little voice and I just stared at him. He was kind of flushed and a little sweaty and it looked like he'd been dancing and having a great time, and jealousy just twisted my gut. He told me that he'd been looking for me, and then his date sidles up to us."

Hermione actually starts to regret starting this story, because now that she's halfway through, she doesn't want to finish it. It's shameful, to be honest.

"I didn't really want to meet his date, but I _knew_ her." Hermione glances at her feet. "Her name was Lavender, and she was one of the girls in my class. She came around often, but nothing ever happened between her and Ron, and then Ron was standing here _with_ her, and I know he knew _exactly_ how I felt about him.

"And he took one look at my expression and started babbling, 'Oh my god. Oh my god. I shouldn't have— I didn't think you would—' and he looked dreadful. And first I punched him, and Lavender was rushing to his side, and I swear that after that I was just turning around to walk away, but—" She chokes on her words. Years later, she and Ron had laughed about it, but now they haven't spoken in a while and it seems wrong for her to share this with somebody else.

"But my foot caught the leg of the table and— in front of a couple hundred senior classmen, the entire refreshment table collapsed. On his leg."

Hermione is having trouble breathing.

"Go on," Tom says gently, and when Hermione glances up, his eyes are dark and gleaming and his fingers have stilled where they brush against her skin. She doesn't want to go on.

She hears herself speaking anyway. "I visited him in the hospital, and the entire right side of his face was black and blue. And his leg was broken, obviously."

Tom laughs. Hermione glances up, hurt, but he shakes his head. "Wicked left hook, huh?" he says, and she has to fight the smile that quirks her lips.

"I sat by his bed for kind of a while, and we just stared at each other, and everything between us just felt heavy. And awful. And then I just didn't know what to say so I said, 'you need to drink more milk,' and he laughed."

"That's it?" Tom asks.

"That's it," Hermione whispers.

There is silence, while Tom looks down at her on the floor and seems to consider everything she said.

"You didn't do anything wrong," he says finally, and reaches out to brush a strand of hair out of her face.

And all she can do is stare and pretend that his opinion doesn't mean anything to her.

**.**

When she wakes up in the morning, Tom Riddle's file is sitting on her desk.

There's a note attached to the front of it, in a slanted, curving handwriting that says, _it was nice knowing you, doctor._

Hermione picks up the file and stuffs it into the top drawer of her desk.

**XII.**

He looks surprised to see her, holding her notebook and her pen and carefully shutting the door behind her. There are a couple of seconds when his face knots up, like he's desperately trying to understand what she's doing here.

"You didn't read it," he says suddenly, the revelation seeming to hit him like a ton of bricks. He manages to keep his seat, and Hermione takes the one across from him. They're not ready to go back to the floor just yet.

"I wanted to give you a chance to tell me yourself," she says quietly, and makes a point of setting her notebook down just out of her own reach. The pen is in her pocket. She folds her hands on the table.

He scowls. "Why do you think I left the file on your desk?"

"I thought I told you to stop leaving your cell," she mutters, before she can stop herself. He ignores her.

"I don't want to _tell_ you. I just thought that you would want to know."

She sighs. "And that I wouldn't want to work with you anymore once I did."

"That's hardly the point. The point is that you didn't read it, and now I have half a mind to take it back."

"You don't know where it is."

He finally looks up and meets her eyes there, and mirth there is a coiling mix of sickening and beautiful. "It's in the top drawer of your desk," he says, as though it's the most obvious thing in the world.

It's her turn to ignore him, and the way her stomach churns. "How have you been getting out of here?" she asks instead, and glances up at the thick glass that separates him from the corridor.

"Not answering that," he says immediately, and leans back in his chair. His hands are on his knees.

"Then tell me how you got in here in the first place," she offers.

He considers her in silence.

"Who am I talking to?" he asks finally. "My doctor, or the girl who broke her crush's leg?"

Hermione can feel herself turn pink. "I am _always_ your doctor," she says firmly.

He nods, and smiles. "Good to know."

And when he closes his eyes, still smiling, she knows that she might as well just leave.

**.**

When she gets back into her office, the first thing she does is hide the file somewhere else. No matter how many times she moves it, all in the course of five minutes, she feels as though he can tell. In the end, she tucks it into the back of her notebook, and presses the empty folder that she brought with her the day she first went to see him into the top drawer of her desk.

When she walks by Tom's cell, five minutes later, on her way to see another patient, he is lying on his bed. He waves as she passes, and she studiously ignores him. It's obvious that he hasn't left his cell since she was in there, and yet, somehow, she is completely certain that he has.

**XIII.**

"If you're not going to read it, than why do you care if I take it back?" He won't get out of bed. She's sitting at the table.

"I don't care," she says.

He smiles. "Then why do you carry it with you everywhere?"

Her eyes flick to the notebook on the table. He grins in triumph. "Exactly," he says, and leans his head back up against the wall.

"I don't want to read it," she says. "I want to hear it from you."

"I don't know what you will accomplish with that."

"This file was written by somebody else. I want to hear it from you."

He sneers. "Aren't you supposed to favor impartiality, doctor?"

She shrugs. "How impartial do you expect the doctors who talked to you to be?"

"More impartial than I would be."

She runs her fingers up along the spiral binding of her notebook. Her nails are horribly long by the Institute's standards, and when she folds her hand into a fist, they press crescent moons into her flesh. She remembers holding the paper crane in her palm.

"Just tell me why," she says finally. "Tell me why, and then I'll read the file."

His eyes dart to the notebook on the table, and she doesn't know what else to do, so she splays her palm flat on the table and sends the notebook flying across the room, his file along with it. The pages make a rippling sound as they go crashing to the ground, and slowly, very slowly, Tom turns to look right at her.

"I told Lily how I felt, before we left for college," he spits. "And she threw me out of her life."

Hermione swallows.

"And you know what?" he says suddenly, as though it's just occurred to him for the first time. "Not the colors, or the face, but – she looked a little like you."

**.**

Her father picks up the phone on the first ring. "Hermione," he says cheerily, and she can hear her mother laughing in the background.

"Hey, daddy," she says quietly. "Can I talk to mom?"

Minerva is walking by her office, and gives her a strange look through the glass wall. Hermione shrugs. _Business,_ she mouths, and Minerva walks away, even though she clearly doesn't believe her.

She can hear the phone change hands.

"Sweetheart," her mother says. Hermione smiles.

"Mom," she says quietly. "Have you ever been really, really afraid?"

And, with her mother's reassuring voice buzzing in her ear, Hermione flips open Tom's file.

**XIV.**

He's been waiting for her. She's on the other side of the glass, but she can see him emerging out of the darkness. His hair is a sleepy mess, and thunder burns and crackles in her ears.

"You killed all of them," she breathes, honesty like icicles forcing themselves between them. "You killed her entire family because she told you no."

He looks at the ground, and then tilts his head slowly up at her. "Because they _took_ her from me," he says quietly. "Yes."

She thinks of the way he reassured her when she told him about what happened to Ron, and shiver runs up her spine.

"And then you killed her, too."

His fist lands against the glass, and Hermione takes a small step backwards. When he looks up at her, his eyes are wild. "She _still_ didn't want me."

Lightening boils the sky and burns the clouds in the world on the outside of their cinderblock castle. She feels the words inside her, rising like a monster, climbing up and out and ripping her heart to royal red ribbons on its way out. "I am so sorry," she whispers, and horror assuages her, as his face melts into utter disbelief.

"What did you say?" he asks, but she's already running, and the heat of her sweaty palms is already fading on the other side of the glass.

When she wakes up, he's sitting in her desk chair. It's the first time she's seen him out of his cell, and Hermione realizes that he was right: until now, she hadn't trusted herself to be certain. His hands are folded in his lap, and his eyes are closed, and when he leans back, the front two legs of the chair tip upward.

Hermione rolls over, eyes foggy with sleep, and her cheek brushes against his leg.

He starts, and looks down at her. His eyes are still wild, the pupils still dilated, and he's breathing like a wounded animal. And even as she pats the floor beside her, she is pretending that this is doing her job.

They end up side-by-side, staring up at the ceiling in the darkness. It's not their ceiling-sky, not without the brilliance of the fluorescent-flavored stars, but it is close enough. She finds that she is not afraid.

"I just wanted to talk to her. That was all. Because I'd scared her off with my feelings all those years ago. But she should have been mine. We were always meant to have each other." The words sound as though they're strangling him.

"But when I went to talk to her, her husband was furious, and he screamed at her, about me, about us— and, I'm not sure how he even knew who I was. But he looked like one of the _assholes_ who beat the shit out of me in high school, and he was furious, and she was apologizing, and— it was a butter knife, actually."

"And their son?" Hermione breathes. Horror, like a blanket, is the only thing keeping her warm.

"That was an accident," he says. "Fell down the stairs when I was running up after her. I just wanted her to listen and she was _running_. The moment got away from me, and I was still trying to snatch at it.

"And when I finally got her— I didn't even mean to be holding the knife —and I told her that it was going to be alright, because she had me, and she just was sobbing and screaming that she didn't _want_ me. And then she was dead. And I was holding the goddamn knife.

"I didn't see the kid until I walked back downstairs, lying next to the father, all tangled up in his own limbs, and his hair dripping into his eyes. He had her eyes."

Hermione can't breathe.

"But that's the thing," Tom says suddenly, and he rolls over onto his side. She has to turn her head to look into his eyes. The wildness has melted from them, and they're just bright like pinpricks of liquid light in the darkness. "You're just like me. You understand how it feels."

"What?" she says softly.

"That's why you punched Ron. That's why you broke his leg."

"I didn't mean—" Hermione starts to say, but he's just looking at her, and his face says that she shouldn't try to protest, because he knows her better than that.

So she does the only thing she can think of. She reaches over to cup his cheek and says, "Yeah. I understand."

She's not sure if that's a lie. She's not sure if she wants it to be.

**XV.**

They just sit and stare at each other.

She can't think of a single thing to say, and she doesn't think that he would answer.

But he looks at her, and every time he blinks, she can hear his voice inside her head.

_You're just like me._

**_._**

She's still awake when he walks in. His gait is so casual that she can almost forget that he's supposed to be locked up, that he's just snuck past a security guard, that he's her patient and she's his doctor, and that he brutally stabbed two people to death, and accidentally killed a child.

That's the key word, though, _accidentally,_ and her brain does this awful little thing where it wants to see the best in him.

_He didn't mean to,_ she thinks desperately. _He was just hurt. I know how it feels to hurt._ And when he drops down to the floor beside her, she doesn't have the slightest idea what to say.

It turns out that she doesn't need to say anything, even though she is so cold and her landlord has just called to say that she's been evicted. The lights are off everywhere, and it's just them and the security guards upstairs, and the one in the outer lobby.

It's just them and the ceiling that isn't sky looming above their heads.

His kiss is scorching, and she pulls him tightly to her, feeling his body nestled perfectly around her curves. She lets him push her backward, until he's lying atop her, and he could choke her or smother her or drown her in the brutal palm of his hand.

He could stab her between the breasts with a butter knife, but those are just his fingers, burning like a wound as they pull up her t-shirt. His hands glide along her sides, and her nipples peak in the cold air. His breath is echoing in her ear.

"Tom," she gasps, and she wants to lock him up between her legs. She wants to stop. She wants to never let go. Her hands are clutching at his hair as his lips are at her navel, and then his fingers are prying beneath the waistband of her pants, and her hips are lifting of their own accord to help him.

"Lily," he whispers quietly when he sinks into her, and, oh, it's _too_ easy for Hermione to pretend not to hear it. He's frantic, and his thrusts are almost as painful as the carpet rubbing up against her back. Hermione wraps her legs around his waist and pulls him deeper anyway.

When she comes, fists knotted in his hair, legs locked around his waist like a cage, her breath leaves her in one final, fatal gasp.

"You didn't mean to," she blurts out, into the heavy, empty air. They both know exactly what she's talking about. The ceiling that is not the sky is spinning, and that's how she knows that she is crying.

He looks down at her, with these clear, sad eyes that make her feel like she's misunderstood everything. "Yes, I did," he says, and then he spends himself inside of her.

After, when their sweat is cooling on her skin except in the places that they are pressed together, she runs a hand up along his back into his hair. "It's alright," she whispers. "I don't believe you."

He doesn't try to correct her, not even when she wakes him up at three in the morning so that he can go back to his cell.

**XVI.**

They're too busy not talking to notice that Minerva is standing in the viewing room. There's about a half hour of silence, just the two of them breathing in the smell of sex on the other one, before Tom bothers to look up.

And his eyes narrow, and Hermione knows immediately what is going on.

**.**

When Minerva steps into her office later, Hermione isn't surprised. She just takes a deep breath and tries not to think about the file in her desk drawer of the way the carpet smells like _fucking_.

Minerva is blunt, as always, and for once Hermione is thankful for it. "It has come to the attention of the security staff that Tom Riddle has been exiting his cell."

_Finally,_ Hermione thinks, but she tries to look shocked. "That's impossible."

Minerva purses her lips. "It is irrefutable, at this point. There's footage— incredibly limited footage —from as long as fifteen weeks ago."

"Then why hasn't he just left?" Hermione asks. The file in her drawer is beating like some kind of tell tale heart.

"Can you picture him slipping past lobby security? The door is armed, anyway."

"I can't picture him slipping past second floor security, either," Hermione murmurs "And his cell door is armed, too."

Minerva takes a deep breath. "That's what I'm here to talk to you about, Hermione."

She at least has the decency not to accuse her outright, and maybe she honestly still doesn't suspect. Either way, this is the gentlest Hermione has ever seen her.

"I wanted to make sure you're being careful."

Hermione bristles, anyway. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that I've given you a relatively long leash on this, and I want to make sure that you're being careful around him."

"He's not terribly dangerous to begin with," Hermione says, and realizes that it isn't normal for her to think that, not since she read the files. But Minerva doesn't know she's read the file. "He's different from the others." _From the ones we're not allowed to give the pens to._

Minerva sighs and leans across the desk. "Give me a couple ways that he is different."

Hermione rises to the challenge. "He can engage in ongoing conversation," she pauses. "His lucidity, mostly. The others aren't the slightest bit present, even when they're answering my questions."

Minerva nods, and her fingers lightly brush against the back of Hermione's hands. She looks suddenly very sad. "That's because their illnesses make them less capable. His makes him _more."_

**XVII.**

Her notebook hits the floor with a disgusting smack.

Tom's cell is empty.

Hermione's first reaction is to think that he's snuck out, that he's waiting for her in her office. And she stumbles into the stairwell so unsteadily that she almost careens down the stairs. Her heart is racing, even as she knows that he cannot be that stupid, that he would never sneak out in the middle of the day.

And, of course, her office is empty, too.

Inside her stirs a blind panic, as though she's lost a limb or her eyes or her heart or something crucial. He can't be gone without her. No one else would understand.

The climb back up the stairwell is more difficult, and each step seems to take forever. There is a horrible buzzing in her ears, like she's moving through a fog. But when she steps around the corner, in to the corridor, the fog shatters like a pane of glass.

Minerva is standing there, bent over the scattered contents of Hermione's notebook, and Hermione watches with undisguised horror as she picks Tom's file out of the pile with strong, steady fingers.

Hermione is suddenly and unnecessarily reminded of how unkempt she is. Her nails are jagged where she's bit them, her hair tied back tightly to disguise how terribly bushy it has become. Splashing watcher on her face every morning in the staff bathroom has done little more than dull her skin. She feels sick.

And yet, when Minerva straightens, and looks at her with disappointed, accusing eyes, Hermione only has one thing to say. "Where is he?" she asks breathlessly.

"Solitary confinement," Minerva says firmly. "He's being transferred to a maximum security facility tomorrow morning."

"You can't," Hermione screams. She can't control herself. "I was helping him— you can't take him away. How is he going to get better? He _needs_ m—"

"Doctor!" Minerva roars suddenly. "_Enough."_ And she says it just like Tom did.

Her shoulder brushes angrily against Hermione's as she storms past, fury carving out all the curves and angles of her form. "I'll see you in my office this afternoon to discuss the details of your termination."

And Hermione, whose body has completely given up on keeping it together, feels her stomach heave just before she vomits all over the linoleum floor.

**.**

The security guard doesn't seem sure if he should let her in, and Hermione presses her advantage, because she has until tomorrow to pack up her things and leave, and she's not sure how long it's going to take Minerva to alert the entire staff.

It's a delicate situation, when a doctor has been letting a patient out of his cell (which she hasn't) and stealing files from the resident's office (which technically she never did).

But when the guard wavers, Hermione pleads, and tells him that it's just hard for her to say goodbye to a patient that she's been working with for so long, even if she's already lost track of the weeks.

When the door closes behind her, Tom doesn't look up. He's folded into the corner, knees drawn up to his chin, because there isn't a bed or a table or even some nailed down chairs for them to sit in. He looks small, and tired, and Hermione kneels down beside him and puts her hand under his chin.

"Did they hurt you?" she asks, and he turns to look at her in the darkness. The way his mouth splits to show his teeth is almost feral, and there is a bruise beginning to swell beneath his eye.

"Oh my god. They hit you," she breathes.

He inclines his head. "They'll do worse than that where I'm going."

"No," she says. Tears are gathering in her eyes.

"I'm a monster, Hermione," he says, and it's the first time that he hasn't called her 'doctor.'

"No," she blubbers, and the tears spill.

"Yes," he says, and brushes away a tear with the pad of his thumb. "I never did deny it. And I've grown to enjoy it, I think."

"But you didn't—" she sobs, and she has absolutely no idea how to finish that sentence. Because he just _didn't_, even if he did. Her heart is broken.

"But—" she tries again.

"But," he interrupts. "It was nice knowing you. And I want to thank you."

"Thank me?" Hermione whimpers, because she cannot decide for the life of her what good she could have possibly done for him.

"For freedom. However brief."

"Freedom?" she repeats lamely, and his lips are pressing up against the corner of her mouth the next time he speaks.

"You never locked the door to my cell properly behind you. Never once." And she shivers when he takes his hand away because part of her, a secret, rotten part of her, seems to have known it all along.

The last bit of resistance snaps like a thread inside of her.

If the guard can tell she's been crying when she exits, he doesn't say a word. And, once the door has clicked shut behind her, Tom's smile splits the darkness like a moon.

_**(after)**_

In the end it isn't with a butter knife.

That would be poetic, but Hermione doesn't know a single thing about stabbing, and that's bloody and gruesome and raw. A baseball bat is easier, because there's one of her friend Harry's in the back of her car from last summer's vacation, and because it has just enough commitment behind a single swing to get her where she wants to go.

In the end, she's quieter than she expects, stealthier than she believes. In the end, there isn't even a scream for her to be afraid of.

It's determination that leads her to insensitivity, to drive the force of the bat into the lobby guard's back in one cruel— but shaky —swing, and after that, it's just the easiest thing in the world. All the while, she's thinking of Tom, even though the second guard doesn't even have a gun, and all she has to do is kick him, hard, in the back of the knees. Then in the face, once he's lying on he ground, because she doesn't know if he's the one who hit Tom.

She doesn't really care. None of them _understand_, and that's enough to blind her. She's running in the dark when the alarm goes off, and she guesses that the guard at the front desk wasn't down for the count.

She regrets not bashing the guard's skull in, but her feet make little clicking sounds against the linoleum, and she's running, and the next guard takes a bat to the side of the head, and there's blood this time, splattering across her face. He groans when he goes down, though, so she doesn't think he's dead.

Her eyes slip closed as she reaches for his key ring, and she thinks that if she just gets Tom out, then she can forget about all of this. He'll take her away. And he'll be different. And not like any of the others see him at all.

And there's a clink of the key in the lock, loud and perfect above the roar of the alarm, and when the door slides open, he's standing there are though he's been waiting for her. She leans up, foolish and flighty, for a kiss, and he dodges past her.

His hand catches in hers, and she's whirling, moving as though in a dream, and she imagines, so perfectly, that he says _come on. We need to go_. But everything is fading fast, turning into some sort of sick slow motion, and his hand slips away from hers.

She imagines that he turns to see what happened, and the bat is lying several meters away along the floor. And in the end, it's so quiet beneath the roar of the alarm that Hermione stops breathing long enough for someone to catch hold of her.

Of course it would be Minerva, Minerva who hasn't worked late in weeks, Minerva who hit the alarm, Minerva who had the presence of mind to grab the bat. Hermione sees the two of them, reflected in the glass of a neighboring cell, just as a group of guards comes bellowing down from the third floor.

There's a thunk, and then a terrible pain in her head, and she doesn't see another thing.

**.**

**.**

Most people don't understand how it feels when you realize that you've betrayed yourself.

Hermione Granger knows, and she's pretty sure she knows better than anybody else, but the ceiling is too white for her to really think properly, and her head is pounding. She's pretty sure that someone had to whack her, in the end, or maybe the sedative they gave her is just too strong.

She closes her eyes and tries to let the darkness take her.

In her head, the little white room is on fire, and she's lugging something heavy toward the door. People are yelling at her, and something is biting her ankle, and the linoleum is actually lava beneath her feet.

She's lugging a body.

Desperation is tingling in her fingers, but that's real life and probably has something to do with the IV in her arm, or the sound of the fluorescents buzzing. Her head _really_ hurts.

_You've been so stupid,_ she thinks, and it's taken a week, in and out of every hospital in the state, none of them willing to hold her for more than twenty-four hours, for her to realize that. It's been a week and her head still hurts, and her memory is still foggy, but the fear and disappointment on her parents' faces when they came to visit her-

A week of crying out _Tom_ in her sleep. She has a textbook case of blindness and it just won't go away.

So she forces herself to open her eyes.

Minerva is sitting there, and there are these disgusting, bright red nail marks running down the sides of her face. Her stare says, _yes, you did this_, and Hermione is honestly surprised. She doesn't remember.

All she remembers is Tom turning to look over his shoulder at her, and even that she can't be sure happened for real.

"I thought you were better than this," Minerva says and it's not cold or cruel, but that's an awful lot of words for Hermione to process. She can tell where she is, now, and the fact that they've locked her up in Tom's old cell is almost funny. She might laugh if her head— and heart —weren't in so much pain.

Minerva stands. "It doesn't really matter. You'll have plenty of time in here to think about what happened. We'll even send someone in to talk to you about it, if you like."

Hermione is losing every third word to the pounding in her head.

"Tom?" she groans.

Minerva has the good grace to blanch. "Gone," she whispers. "Does that make you happy?"

_Without me._ Hermione shakes her head. "No."

The cell door closes behind Minerva, and Hermione squeezes her eyes shut again. "I'm an idiot," she says, but even as she speaks the words she cannot help but wonder where Tom is now. If he's alright.

She has no idea how long she lies like that, eyes squeezed shut, trying to picture those last few moments, trying to decide if he really did turn around. She can't picture much of anything, at least until the guard calls for lights out and the fluorescents flicker off.

Hermione opens her eyes, grateful for the darkness. "He left me," she breathes up to the ceiling sky, and tries to get used to calling herself a pawn.

But then her eyes fall on the table, which someone has moved and re-nailed to the floor beside her bed. There's something on it, and Hermione reaches out with a shaking hand to pick it up.

It's a little paper crane, crisp and white as the walls of the room, and even in the dimness of her cell, Hermione can make out the slanting script that climbs along the wings.

_Feel better,_ it says. _And thank you. –T_

She can't imagine, for the life of her, how he got it there, but it means that he hasn't forgotten. Hermione holds the tiny paper bird in her clenched fist, and when she closes her eyes, she can imagine that she sees him on the other side of the mirror.


End file.
